Routledge Studies in Religion and Film

Blind Paul

This book revisits the tradition of Western religious cinema in light of scholarship on St. Paul’s political theology. The book’s subtitle derives from the account in the Book of Acts that St. Paul was temporarily blinded in the wake of his conversion on the road to Damascus. In imitation of Paul,…

This monograph explores the way that the profile and the critical functions of the holy fool have developed in European cinema, allowing this traditional figure to capture the imagination of new generations in an age of religious pluralism and secularization. Alina Birzache traces the cultural…

Biblical Narratives, Film Sub-Genres, and the Comic Spirit

Divine Film Comedies juxtaposes the sacred texts of Christianity with an international array of comic films to cross-fertilize each, showing that the comic resides in the Bible, and the gospel lurks in the movies. From the story of Abram and Sarai giving birth to "Laughter" to the story of the man…

While Jesus has been a star attraction at the cinema since the epics of the 1950s, it is often forgotten that between the advent of motion pictures in the 1890s and the close of the ‘silent’ era at the end of the 1920s, some of the longest, most expensive, and most popular films on both sides of…

Humanity in Deep Focus

Forging an open-minded but reasoned dialogue between nine acclaimed titles of world cinema, and a range of theological perspectives that touch on the theme of human experience, World Cinema, Theology, and the Human offers fresh portals of insight for the interdisciplinary area of Theology and Film.…

Representing Religion, Identity and Cultural Myths

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of…

The Postsecular Constellation

The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is…

The Marvel of Stan Lee and the Revolution of a Genre

Stan Lee, who was the head writer of Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, co-created such popular heroes as Spider-Man, Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, and Daredevil. This book traces the ways in which American theologians and comic books of the era were not only both saying…